Science leads the way at Davos

0:16Hello, welcome to the Naked Scientist podcast. This is the show that brings you the biggest breakthroughs and also talks to the major movers and shakers in the worlds of science, technology and medicine. I'm Chris Smith. And this week, we're going to find out why science matters at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

0:40The Davos World Economic Forum is an annual gathering of global leaders in business, government and academia who convene in Davos, Switzerland. to discuss major world issues. The strapline is connecting leaders to make sense of global challenges and move the world forward. Topics such as emerging technologies, economics and geopolitics all go under the microscope. And the presence of so many powerful movers and shakers all under one roof means this can be a potent catalyst for change. This year, one team are going to be banging the drum extra hard for science. The open access publisher Frontiers are unveiling the Frontiers Science House to engage policymakers, the business community and opinion formers.

1:24And teaming up with Frontiers this week, we have been getting a sneaky peek. Waiting inside, glittering new initiatives in immunology, fusion energy and sustainable agriculture, which we will hear about along the way. Throwing open the door to the Science House for us is Chief Executive Editor Fred Fenter. The Frontier Science House is going to be the home for science in Davos during this annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. As you know, the World Economic Forum is composed of leaders in business and finance, also in policy and academia, media, etc. And our objective with the Frontier Science House is to bring science directly into this community of leaders that gather every year in Davos.

2:07One of the criticisms of outreach and trying to engage people with science is often we end up preaching to the converted because if people see some things about science and they're interested in science they will seek it out. The people who are not won't. So how are you going to not preach to the converted? A lot of people are probably not aware of the fact that for most of the challenges that we face as a global society, we still need new science in order to build out the solutions for these problems. So it's extremely important that this dialogue takes place so that the business leaders, the funders and the policymakers can directly talk to the scientists who are on the cutting edge.

2:47They're on the forefront of developing this new science which is so desperately needed in terms of being able to address these societal challenges. So talk us through how you're going to do it then. You've got a venue which is going to be at the World Economic Forum. it is going to be the NIDAS around which science and business nucleate. How and what will happen? It's going to be a place where we are going to be able to bring together the people who are part of this Davos network and people with exceptional decisional power and they also have very, very high influence within their organisations.

3:25And so at a very high level, what we'd like to be able to do is actually bring these people to the same table as scientists and have deep discussions about how science can play a role in terms of planning the future of their own organizations. So what sorts of science and scientists do you anticipate planting in front of these people? We have hundreds of speakers across the week. We will have the executive chair of the Human Immunome Project, Jane Metcalf. Jane is a fantastic speaker. She's always able to sort of project this perspective on how biotech innovation can reach into everyday life. But we're also going to be talking about the energy bottleneck, which will be on the minds of many people there in Davos.

4:12So we'll have Peter Ross, who is the CEO of Novatron Fusion. So he'll be there to give us an idea of realistically how close are we to being able to inject fusion energy practically into the grid. We'll be hearing from Mikael Schaeffer, who is the president of the European Innovation Council. And that's also an interesting perspective because he'll be talking about how policy will evolve, particularly in the European context, to support the way that the outputs of research ultimately end up as developed innovation and then industrial scale solutions. Is the aim then that relationships will be born in Davos at the science house?

4:55and then continue after that? Or are you trying to change thinking so that then these influential attendees would just push their businesses, push their countries in different directions in an ideal science-led direction afterwards? They're concerned about the quality of their leadership and what we'd like to stress is the fact that strong leadership requires people to be informed, thinking ahead of time about how these different technological developments are going to converge, how they might have certain interesting consequences. But I do hope that all of these people will leave Davos with a better sense that science must be a core consideration for many of the decisions, the informed decisions that they are going to need to make about the future.

5:45Bringing these leaders, the CEOs and scientists to the same table, as I mentioned before, I think this is what is going to make the Frontier Science House uniquely powerful. That was Fred Fenter at Frontiers, and we'll get a quick thought from Fred about what he hopes this year's event will achieve a bit later on. Now, though, we're going to hear from some of the star-studded speakers that Fred mentioned in that piece, including Jane Metcalf. She's the executive chair of the Human Immunome Project, which is a global non-profit organisation dedicated to decoding and modelling the immune system.

6:18With an ambitious five-year project, she envisages bringing her immune map into the clinic in much the same way that genomics and proteomics have begun to unlock new diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities. It's a system way of thinking about immunology in which we're not focused on just the individual players that make up the immune system, but we're looking about how all of the molecules and the cells and the tissues and the organs work together, how they interact with other systems in the body, like the genome or the microbiome or the metabolome. And what we are thinking about is three-dimensional models, not just flat cartography.

7:04But then the immune system is not static. It's constantly changing, not only from day to day, but it also evolves over time as you go from an infant whose immune system is very naive, hasn't been exposed to very many things, to somebody in middle age, to an elderly person whose immune system is starting to fail. And so we think of it as a 3D model, but it's four-dimensional because it changes over time. People have been studying the immune system, though, for decades and slowly piecing together which cells appear to do what, what the major roles for those different systems are. So how is this different from what we've learned so far?

7:48People have been looking at the B cells and the T cells, the neutrophils and the lymphocytes. What we're interested in is not just what are the different players in the system, but how do they interact with each other and how do they change over time? So that's really what's changing. You know, the whole concept of systems biology is still relatively new. And coming out of the tech industry, you know, systems thinking is a technology. primarily that is enabled by things like big data, our ability to collect huge amounts of data and process that and see patterns and then see underlying mechanisms of action.

8:31So we're bringing the technology to this way of thinking about biology, which allows us to understand so much more complexity than we can if we're just studying mast cells or T cells. Indeed. So if you were a neuroscientist and you were studying individual brain cells, the comparison would be rather than just look at that brain cell in that brain region, I'm going to look at an MRI scan of a whole brain and how it's working in situ to work out what role that cell plays, but in the big picture. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's a great analogy. So how are you doing it? If you walk in the door, Chris, and sit down and say, hey, doc, how's my immune system?

9:14Your doctor doesn't really know. They can do a complete blood count and get the number of cells you have that make up your immune system. But you're not really getting a lot of additional information beyond that. So we're going all the way down to the molecular level and collecting this across all the different actors in your immune system and plugging those into our models so that we can create your baseline immune state today in a far more detailed way than you can currently do with a typical blood test. And then what we want to do is track your immune system over time. So our project is a five-year plan to sample people multiple times over the course of five years so that we can see how it changes, not just how it looks at your baseline when you're healthy, but we also want to challenge your immune system so that we can see how it functionally responds.

10:20And in fact, what we're really driving that is this immune response variability. Why do some people brush off COVID and other people die. The way we want to challenge your immune system is going to be, they call it a threat or an insult, which is like, oh, there's an invader here. Now my immune system has to mount a response. Vaccines do that. They challenge your immune system so that we can see what soldiers show up for battle in a way that is beneficial as opposed to harmful. So we'll see what your baseline is. We'll see what your functional response is, and we'll see how it changes over five years.

10:57Once we collect all that data, then we'll be building these incredible models that can not only quantify your system and how it responds, but then we can start making predictions about how it will respond as you age or to the next threat. What does the actual visual readout look like though, Jane? Because I use the analogy of say an MRI scan of a brain structure that you could then superimpose one bit of the brain talking to another. And you could compare how this part of the brain talks to that bit of the brain with how your brain does the same thing, and we could overlay the two. So what will it look like for the immune system then?

11:38What will the readout be that will enable me to see where I sit relative to the general population and compared to you and my pre-vaccination and post-vaccination immune state, as it were? That's an excellent question. And, you know, going back to the Human Genome Project, you know, Francis Collins and Craig Venter and the other leaders of the Human Genome Project were very focused on the science and collecting the data. But it took translational experts to translate that into reports that clinicians can use in the doctor's office. One of our board members is Linnea Avey, who was one of the two co-founders of the company 23andMe, which took that genetic information and translated it for the general public.

12:29So there's the original science, and then there's the translators, and then you can translate either to doctors or you can translate to the public. And so we're doing the initial science. And once we get that figured out, we will then start to think about how to facilitate the translation to clinical practice and how to make this understandable for patients. What are you going to do in Davos? Davos is one of the greatest opportunities to find global leaders who are thinking in a system-oriented way. And so we want to bring our systems immunology to that group of people. We want to explain the project.

13:15We want to make people aware of it. It's a great opportunity to meet health leaders, governmental leaders, business leaders, and policymakers. We're trying to start a movement. We're trying to harness technology to do better science so that we can take what we understand from a scientific specific basis and translate that into a new way of practicing medicine. The minute you're born, we sequence your genome, which helps us, first of all, identify rare genetic diseases much more quickly, but also gives us what your potential risk factors are. Genes are not fate. So just because you have a gene doesn't necessarily mean you will get sick.

13:57But if you know about these risk factors early on in your life, you might make choices to protect yourself as much as possible. we would love for that to be the first step and the second step is to decode your immunome and to track it over time what if decoding the patient's immunome was like the 21st century version of a stethoscope what can we do to support your immune system so that it doesn't develop into sickness isn't that exciting jane metcalf there she's the executive chair of the human immunome project. The Naked Scientist podcast is produced in association with Spitfire, cost-effective voice, internet and IP engineering services for UK businesses.

14:41Find out how Spitfire can empower your company at spitfire.co.uk.

14:49Music in the programme is sponsored by Epidemic Sound, perfect music for audio and video productions. And this is the Naked Scientist podcast with me, Chris Smith. And this week, we are finding out how science is being pushed to the top of the agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos. We're heading to Stockholm now, though, to hear from Peter Rose, who's the chief executive officer at Novatron Fusion. Now, as the name implies, he works in fusion energy, which is the process where lighter atomic nuclei combine to form heavier nuclei and release enormous amounts of energy in the process. This is the very same reaction that powers the sun and its potential to provide clean and some say limitless energy has captivated scientists for more than a century.

15:33But Peter and his team think they now may have overcome it. And I began by asking him to explain first the challenges and then how he thinks they may have overcome them. The approach is to actually try to industrialise fusion, work that has been done for so many years, almost 100 years now. how to harness the process that is in the core of the sun that gives us the energy that we can live on here on Earth as well. And it didn't take milliseconds for humanity and the scientists to think, wow, now that we understand that process, how can we make that happen on Earth? Can we do that in small scale, some kind of technology that we can do this?

16:12Because it would be safe. It would be more or less endless of energy because the fuel is abundant and it would be a stable baseload power that would serve all the needs that we will have for humanity without having any bad aspects to climate or sustainability and the environment. But obviously, we don't have fusion reactors here on Earth yet because it's really, really tricky to do that. and you need to have extremely high temperatures. We're talking about 150 million degrees or more, which is 10 times higher the temperature in the core of the sun. Science have driven it to a stage where we have solved most of the problems, but still a few small hurdles left.

16:59One of them is to have a stable confinement of this so-called fusion plasma. That is, when you heat up a hydrogen gas to these extremely high temperatures, The atoms rip apart and this plasma is hard to contain in this machine without touching the vessel boundaries. That is what all the different projects around the world is now trying to solve to be able to have fusion energy for humanity. And how does your approach differ? Or if there are lots and lots of projects trying to crack this nut and it has proved to be a very hard nut to crack for decades, What's your approach? To be able to do that, having this extremely high-tempered plasma, you need to have it in a vacuum vessel because it can't really touch anything.

17:50It's obvious. We don't have any materials that can stand the type of heat. So it needs to be floating in mid-vacuum. And we use magnets, strong magnetic force, to make sure that the plasma is floating in the middle of these vacuum vessels. And this is the tricky part because it's like balancing a ball on top of a bowl that is upside down. It's kind of an unstable confinement of the plasma where the plasma really want to hit the walls of this vessel. And when it does, the process just stops. That is what most approaches are trying to do. And is Novatron fusion better at doing the balancing act?

18:30Exactly, because what we are doing is instead we have the ball inside that bowl. By having a magnetic configuration that has this type of behaviour, it will be a self-stabilising solution, something that is inherently stable, which is rather the opposite from all the other concepts. What's been the breakthrough that's enabled you to realise that, that others have not? This insight has been known for decades, actually, but no one has really figured out how to design the magnets and to create a magnetic field with these type of properties, with this concave-in-all-directions behavior. And that is what our inventor here in Sweden, John Jadaberg, really figured out.

19:23At the same time, the magnetic field doesn't need to be very, very strong, as long as it has this shape. And this was something that you presented to scientists and they were saying this is the missing piece. This is the solution that will add the stability that we're lacking right now. Have you tested it? We have built the first machine, the Nordrond-1, here in Stockholm. It has been commissioned and we've been running it for one year now, doing experiments. And so far it looks really, really good. You're optimistic then? You think this is going to work? This is one of the most exciting interviews about nuclear fusion I think I've heard in a very long time because actually someone is saying to me we have a possible solution.

20:04Yeah, I hope so. Actually, we think we have what we're missing. We are convinced. Yeah, we have found something that dramatically reduces the complexity of building such a machine and that gives us hope. What are you going to be doing in Davos? We see that one of the big things about making commercial fusion a reality, we need to understand and make people understand that there is large economical values in this as well. But there is also big discussions needed to be held regarding the fairness about access to energy. The countries that are really lacking energy, like sub-Sahara, for instance, or places in Asia, what economical muscles should we use to make sure that this type of technology is not only implemented here in the Western countries, but on a global scale?

21:00What is our responsibility to humanity to make sure that we have a solution that works well for all people? the classic line is that fusion is 10 years away and it always will be are you telling me that quote's now going to be wrong what is your timeline then to do this including doing it in an in an equal and fair way what people have been saying for quite a long time is that it's like 30 years away and always will be 30 years away so your 10 years is pretty optimistic but we try to combine optimism with realism and say that we will be able to produce energy to the grid before 2040. For us to be able to do that, some things need to be fulfilled, like the financial muscles need to be there to make sure that all these different technologies that is needed to be developed can be done.

21:54But also we talk about regulations, a political will, different type of partnerships, All the things need to be aligned to be able to do that. But we see that it can be done. It is not unrealistic to have it at least ready for 2040, maybe even earlier, if we are really convinced that this is a necessity for humanity. So the race is on. Are we going to be plugging into fusion power by 2040? That is certainly the most exciting and optimistic outlook that I have heard on this subject in a very long time. Peter Rose there. He's the chief executive officer at Novatron Fusion. Next, we're going to the University of Colorado Boulder and Zia Murabi.

22:35Now, when he's not out indulging his passion for cycling in his beautiful surroundings, Zia spends much of his time studying the environmental and societal benefits that can be delivered by changing the way we farm crops. He's advocating for listening to nature. It's had, after all, millions of years to evolve ways to make ecosystems work efficiently, and our efforts often flow contrary to it. The approach he's advocating for is called diversified agriculture. But what does that mean in practice and does it make economic sense? Diversified agriculture is the act of adding diversity back into agricultural systems.

23:13If you look in nature, you never really see one crop or even one plant growing by itself. You always see animals and plants in mixtures. Plants are interacting with plants and plants are interacting with animals and they're all interacting in an ecosystem. The idea of diversified agriculture is to take these ideas and build them into our agricultural systems so they model nature better. Nature's been working for 500 million years. Evolution has been working at it to make things work. So when we grow a monoculture and it's a field of wheat and it's exclusively wheat, we're basically forcing nature's hand then.

23:48and those plants do not like growing like that they haven't evolved really to grow like that and we're possibly getting a less good deal than if we were a bit more natural is what you're saying we like to like simplify things as a species right and to make things easier and so to make things easier we started growing the same things together it tipped along like this for you know millennia but what happened was you know in the last century we've gone from this phase of agricultural expansion to one of intensification. We had this package deal of seeds and fertilizers and water and machinery. And we basically grew crops in ways that they don't fall down when you put too much nitrogen on them.

24:29And in that process, we have intensified all of that land. And actually, we've got ourselves into a bit of a sticky situation. Pest outbreaks and nitrogen runoff and climate change, all of these issues are emergent from this intensification process that we've seen around monocultures. And therefore, your argument would be that the benefit of reverting to a more natural, diversified approach is that some of the solutions will be provided by nature. We won't have to sling on so many chemicals. Exactly. And there's a lot of evidence to show this. A classic example would be the Three Sisters system.

25:07You have beans growing with squash, growing with maize. Beans provide the nitrogen to the maize, and the squash covers the ground, so it controls the weed. And then you also get a package of really nutritional output. It just so happens that this isn't an isolated case. There are many different diversified agricultural systems, aquaculture and rice systems in China, or flower strips in Switzerland, or prairie strips in Iowa, or silver pastoral systems in Latin America, and the list goes on. And all of these systems offer some benefits. So they'll control pests. And so you can apply like 60 % less pesticide, or they will control nitrogen runoff, like up to 90 % in cases, or they will lead to yield benefits and more output per unit of land.

25:51So you don't have to use so much land. So we actually have good kind of good evidence that this work. Can it work well enough, though? Because on the one hand, you've got farmers, especially in the UK at the moment, they're saying they're barely making any money. And the intensification that you mentioned has driven down prices. So supermarkets can buy huge amounts of perfect looking carrots, but they don't pay very much for them. So that's one point. And the second point is we do have a rising world population, eight and a half billion of us on the planet now, up 30 % in the last two decades.

26:24People are hungry. And if we don't keep flogging the ground the way we are, many argue, well, we just won't have the food productivity to feed everybody. So can we do it this way? Agricultural development over the last 60 years has really been predicated on the idea that you yield that is bolstered by monocultures in this package deal that I just talked about. Now, the reality is, is that has brought massive environmental costs, which are actually costing us hundreds of millions of dollars of damages from climate change. Even in the US alone, you're talking about like tens of billions of dollars a year in cleaning nitrates out of water.

27:02When it comes to water use, 90 % of our water use is going to agriculture. A third of our gas emissions can be traced back to agriculture. So when you think about the current paradigm and the way we produce food, it's actually environmentally damaging and extremely costly. That doesn't even touch on all of the health damages associated with antibiotic resistance and things like that. About$900 billion is spent on agricultural subsidies each year. That shows that there's actually a lot of money that's going into propping up the damaging agricultural system that we see in the world today. And actually, there's a lot of opportunity that exists for not taking new taxpayer money, but actually re-diverting the money that taxpayers are already paying to pollute the planet, and actually putting it towards supporting more diversified agriculture that has less of an impact on the planet.

27:56Is it, though, an education problem then? So rather than us spending money on chemicals and technologies per se, what we should be spending money on are teachers who can go and spread the word about these agricultural practices. And that would be money well spent. There's not one silver bullet. Like we're going to need education around the existing practices. But there's also, and I think this is the opportunity for the World Economic Forum, when you look at the agricultural businesses of today, they typically are looking at improving particular seeds in monoculture environments or very close, you know, like soy maize rotations, right?